Must Read: "Another Perspective"

Two weeks ago, before Jamie Dimon’s thoughtful diversion, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway instructed viewers of CNBC that “civilized people don’t buy gold, they invest in productive businesses”. Munger was right in that civilized people invest in productive businesses and was right to imply that gold is a non-productive rock, but, in our humble opinion, he was wrong to suggest that gold does not have significant upside as an investment currently (even more than BRK/A?).

Gold has always been money, as are dollars, euros and yen. It is not a currency or media of exchange presently because no one directly exchanges it for goods, services or assets and it has not formally collateralized other currencies since 1971. However, were gold to once again back today’s baseless currencies, then it would be astonishingly cheap at today’s exchange rates with them (i.e. gold prices), and by extension cheap to most operating businesses denominated in today’s currencies. Gold today is a speculation that someday it will again have recognized monetary status.

Gold is a store of purchasing power bought at certain exchange rates to other currencies – as we write this, about $1,600 an ounce to the dollar, €1,232 an ounce to the Euro, £988 an ounce to sterling, and ¥127,790 an ounce to yen. In the current monetary system in which all global currencies are uncollateralized, the perception of gold’s exchange rate (price) ultimately derives from its status as potential monetary collateral that might someday back government-sanctioned (fiat) money.

Thus, when gold is money or formally backs currencies, people save gold. Given its un-sanctioned monetary status today, gold may be considered an investment. Given its intrinsic cheapness vis-à-vis paper currencies today and economic conditions that make it highly likely it will become even cheaper to them, very civilized people across the world have been replacing a portion of their fiat cash and financial asset portfolios with gold not held in their investment portfolios. (The only way to hold physical bullion in a financial asset portfolio would be to own shares in mining companies, which provide direct ownership of physical bullion inventories held below ground.)

Despite the incessant negative chatter about gold by people in positions of influence, (or more likely because of it), there has been only a trifling allocation to it among financial asset investors. The vast majority of dedicated financial asset and derivative investors, including pension funds, mutual funds, individuals, and even futures speculators, remain either; a) unable to invest in it by charter, b) unconvinced that gold’s price will appreciate over a time horizon that matches their mandates, c) convinced that gold is a poor investment at today’s pricing because authorities will let bank system credit fail, or d) oblivious to what gold is and the economic forces behind it.

Precious metals allocations account for only about 0.15% of global pension fund assets. Within the gold futures market, only 0.50% of front month contracts typically take delivery of bullion, implying gold futures remain a source of financial return among speculators, not a means of amassing a physical position. Meanwhile, all gold and silver ETFs combined held only 90 million gold-equivalent ounces as of the end of April, which at about $1,650 an ounce equaled only about $150 billion. (Compare that to Apple’s market cap.) And perhaps the most telling indicator of indifference to gold among financial asset investors: the total market capitalization of all publicly traded precious metal miners (representing trillions in below-ground physical reserves) is only about $360 billion.

We think there are four main questions to be asked and answered: 1) how does one handicap what would be a multi-sigma event – whether or not gold will again gain formal monetary status; 2) over what time horizon might the perception of a significant change in the global monetary system occur (and would it include gold); 3) what would be a range of investment outcomes should such an event occur; and 4) how would such pro forma returns compare with the range of returns of other investments? We have devoted much of our research since 2007 to these questions and have written extensively about them. This paper, however, will only seek to place gold in proper perspective for Mr. Munger (and perhaps Mr. Dimon too).

What’s it all About, Charlie?

The difference between saving and investing is that savers seek to maintain their purchasing power and investors seek to increase theirs. In the current environment it is impossible to save at a positive real rate of return given that interest rates are near zero and central banks are diluting purchasing power through monetary inflation. Everyone is forced to speculate – even cash and (especially) bondholders.

Currently, cash, bank deposits and bond holdings denominated in baseless currencies are being diluted by global central banks and losing significant purchasing power, which means “savers” in these instruments are actually speculating this established trend will stop. Their real (inflation-adjusted) returns are already negative (against CPI), and so, by implication, they believe the return of the majority (but not all) of their purchasing power is better than “speculating” in productive businesses to try to generate a positive return on their current purchasing power.

In this, we agree with Charlie Munger’s partner, Warren Buffett; productive assets are better than cash and bonds denominated in baseless currencies. We agree with any implication that saving in fiat cash or fiat-denominated fixed-income instruments is a loser’s game at current pricing. But we would disagree with any implication that it is not the right time to exchange baseless currencies or most productive businesses denominated in them for gold.

A Bit of Theory

Consider that price is the quantity of money assigned to a good, service or asset, yet changing prices may not necessarily have anything to do with the changing value of goods, services and assets. For example, the value to society of a good, service or asset in relation to its quantity can remain constant or even fall; yet its price can rise substantially if the quantity of money increases more than the increase in demand relative to supply. The more monetary units available to chase the same supply/demand equilibrium, the higher the general price level for goods, services and assets must be.

This means that expectations of increasing or decreasing demand in an economy can only partially rationalize future price changes. The more moving parts (e.g. immigration, innovation, government spending, the whims of independent money issuers, etc.) that affect the supply and demand for goods, services, assets, AND MONEY; the less visibility there will be for prices -- even if expected value is reasonably knowable. So, in the current monetary system, currencies are indeterminate claims on wealth and purchasing power kept in currency is an imperfect marker of wealth. (Of course, we know currency, per se, is not wealth because if it were then wealth could be created simply by creating more currency.)

An easy way to envision how to quantify purchasing power is to imagine two buckets: the first contains all of the world’s money and the second contains all things not-money. We may debate about the proper relative value of the various items in the money bucket (e.g. dollars, euros, yen, gold, etc.), and debate even more vociferously (and do) about the proper relative values of the items in the all-things-not-money bucket (e.g. toothpaste, labor, accounting fees, stocks, bonds, commodities, iPods, etc); however, it would be illogical to think that the aggregate value of the money bucket should not equal the aggregate value of the all-things-not-money bucket at all times. Conceptually, all the stuff in the world that can be purchased must have a means to be purchased, and so the aggregate value of each bucket must always equal the aggregate value of the other.

So then: if wealth is current and future sustainable purchasing power, and judging the future value of goods, services and assets relies on also judging the quantity of money, and the quantity of money and all the stuff it can buy must always be at equilibrium, then one of the first-order economic considerations among all members of society should be to judge the money in which he or she a) is compensated in, and b) chooses to invest or save in.

Practicalities

Very few people today think about the sustainable value of their money, including, it seems, Messrs. Munger and Buffett. If stocks are cheap to baseless cash, as they rightly argue, and stocks are cheap to gold, as they seemingly imply, then nothing has been determined (or even implied) regarding the relative value of gold to fiat cash within the money bucket. Somewhat strangely, their argument reduces to the contention that money in whatever form it may take – dollars or gold -- has no economic function of value. They argue one should hold stocks as a residual claim on productive assets instead. We would vehemently disagree. We see the value in productive businesses; however, one must also consider the possibility that, even if they are intrinsically undervalued in fiat cash terms, productive business may be intrinsically overvalued in gold terms. (Judging by subsequent performance, it certainly seems BRK/A shares were quite overvalued vis-à-vis gold in 2000.)

When objectively defined and properly priced by the marketplace, the presence of money as a savings vehicle enhances the well-being of society. When subjectively rendered and manipulated by goal-oriented policy objectives, the value of money becomes distorted vis-à-vis goods, services, assets and labor. The difference today between investing in baseless currency-denominated productive businesses and exchanging baseless currencies for gold defines the difference between solving for nominal vs. real returns. Investors in most financial assets denominated in over-leveraged currencies today will receive nominal relative returns while gold holders store absolute real purchasing power (save in real terms).

Which is the better bet? The global gold stock increases about 1%-2% a year as compared to the global fiat money stock which increases many multiples of that. This should be the fundamental consideration when it comes to choosing a money form in which to speculate or in which to price one’s investments: which will have its purchasing power diluted less? If Berkshire Hathaway shares rise 25% in the coming years but the US dollars these shares are denominated in fall 35% versus consumer goods and services, then Munger and Buffet will have invested in productive businesses that made profits yet they would have lost purchasing power in the aggregate for shareholders. This dynamic illustrates precisely what has occurred since 2000.

(Safe) Harborous Relic

What exactly are the economics of shiny rocks as they relate to our very civilized contemporary society? The working figure for the amount of all the above-ground gold ever mined is about 170,000 metric tons, which converts to almost 5.5 billion troy ounces (5,465,619,000). At $1,600 an ounce this implies the recognized total value of all the mined gold in the world is a bit over $8.7 trillion today ($8,744,990,400).

Should we believe the 170,000 metric ton figure? Well, annual worldwide production of gold is about 50 million troy ounces. If we were to assume 50 million ounces mined over the last 200 years, (perhaps generous but this assumption would also be sufficient to include ancient mining since the time of the Aztecs), then there would be about 10 billion ounces mined since antiquity. Unlike other metals with industrial uses, gold is not consumed. Every ounce ever mined still exists. At $1,600 an ounce, the total amount of above-ground gold would equal about $16 trillion. So let’s say gold is currently valued somewhere between $8 trillion and $16 trillion.

Governments and their designated central bank currency issuers do not own most of the above-ground gold in the world. The World Gold Council reports that total official gold holdings throughout the world totals almost 31 thousand metric tons (30,878.2 tonnes), which, at today’s pricing, equals about $1.6 trillion ($1,588,357,750,464). Depending on how much gold has actually been mined, 5.5 or 10 billion ounces, the world’s treasury ministries and central banks only have somewhere between 10% and 18% of it.

This presents a problem for governments that would like to control the perceived value of money. There are no currencies today (since 1971) formally linked to gold or any other relatively finite collateral. This implies that virtually all global governments prefer to have direct control over their budgets, rather than allowing the collective will of their societies determine the scale of government spending. Authoritarian and representative governments alike prefer a global monetary system in which money is effectively issued by fiat and directed by appointed monetary policy makers (usually central banks).

The great challenge for elected and appointed monetary policy makers is to try to manage the quantity and pricing of their fiat currencies consistent with the multi-faceted and unpredictable dynamics of the global economy. Fiat currencies must be widely perceived to be priced more or less equitably, not only by the factors of production and wealth holders within each society but also by the various global governments overseeing economies with greatly different resources, social values and natural economic growth rates.

If global money, formally comprised today of all various baseless fiat currencies, were to begin to be perceived in the commercial marketplace as an insufficient marker of the future value for goods, services and assets, (domestically or internationally); then the global monetary system would be in jeopardy. In short, confidence is lost if and when currency is no longer perceived as a sufficient store of value. In such a scenario currency holders would discard it for goods, services and assets at an accelerating pace. Importantly, they would not necessarily exchange their baseless currency for labor or production, which would be an economic stimulant (or for shares of BRK/A). Prices would rise as economic factors of production, private wealth holders, and participating governments further accelerate their consumption of goods or assets they feel would store value better. Baseless currencies would ultimately lose credibility and the the global monetary system would fail.

When systems fail it does not mean that the values of goods, services and assets change, only that the numeraire of money is reset. (The numeraire is the value reference used to base a unit of account.) Global monetary systems periodically need resetting, most frequently in 1933, 1945 and 1971. Changing the numeraire requires the support of global economic agents, including the private marketplace and international government authorities. This, in turn, requires widespread confidence that the value and nature of the re-setting would not lead to an imminent need for further re-settings. This is precisely why gold remains relevant today.

The more “sophisticated” unreserved credit and its uses become, the more unknowable future purchasing power becomes. The more remote baseless currencies that comprise our global monetary system stray from being sustainable stores of value, the likelier it becomes they will be called into question. (Enter JP Morgan’s public recognition that it has an unwieldy balance sheet.)

Perhaps this is why governments and central banks have continued to own gold? You may recall not too long ago Ben Bernanke was asked if he considered gold to be money and he said “no”. When asked why the Fed still owned it, he shrugged and murmured something about “tradition”. You may also recall that more recently he was asked if the Fed owned gold, and he seemed to do his best to appear perplexed. He looked back and forth over his shoulder until finally an aide confirmed that indeed the Fed does hold gold certificates (which give the Fed rights to Treasury’s bullion).

It shouldn’t be shocking that the manufacturer of the world’s reserve currency expresses public bewilderment with the fascination over anachronistic, inert rocks by a few gentlemen with southern accents. What else could he say: pay no attention to gold’s long history of resetting societies’ wealth valuation mechanism against failed currencies? Or pay no attention to other central banks buying gold hand over fist currently? (Perhaps they are doing so because they want to be more traditional?)

All the Right People, Darling

The absolute amount of gold held in official hands – 10%, 18% or even 25% -- is meaningless. The important concept to keep in mind is that the stock of official gold holdings throughout all economies is quite small relative to privately held bullion. Somewhere in the world there is between $7 and $15 trillion of gold wealth (at current spot pricing) held in private hands (vs. $1.6 trillion in official accounts). Private wealth holders across the world have been saving gold bullion for generations; in Europe, the Middle East, China, India, Japan, Russia, South America and the United States (even in private pockets on Wall Street, believe it not, where there’s an old saying: “make it on Wall Street, bury it on Main Street”).

It should not be surprising that global central banks have begun buying gold bullion in ever increasing amounts. It was just reported this month that Hong Kong shipped almost 63 metric tons of gold to China in March, a 59% increase over February and a 587% increase year over year. Russia has been a consistent buyer of about 5,000 tonnes each month and has recently accelerated its purchases. Other high growth economies including India cannot seem to get sufficient supplies of bullion. Clearly the governments of these countries want to exchange their baseless and diluting reserves for a scarcer money form. And just this week the IMF – yes, the same IMF that had been selling its bullion to central banks of emerging economies with surplus reserves – announced it was buying $2 billion of gold. The reason: “there is a need to increase the Fund’s reserves in order to help mitigate…elevated credit risks”.

Meanwhile, central banks of developed debtor economies are being pressured by their contracting debt-based economies to manufacture more fiat currencies through the process of debt monetization – issuing even more debt and paying for it with newly-created base money (currency and/or bank reserves held at central banks). They are devaluing their currencies for savers and investors and destroying the future purchasing power of surplus reserves held abroad.

If past is prologue, the baseless currencies of developed economies will eventually be subjected to asset monetization. Greece could solve its debt problems tomorrow if it sold Mykonos for $400 billion and the US could halve its Treasury debt if it sold Alaska for $8 trillion. However, such asset sales seem far more unlikely (and in Alaska’s case, impossible – who could buy it?) than simply revaluing an asset already held in official hands -- the asset monetary issuers have always used; the only monetary asset on their balance sheets that can be re-valued higher against the currency they manufacture; (one might say the “traditional” one): gold.

We argue the final outcome must be to devalue current baseless currencies against gold and that governments of high-growth economies are buying official gold in increasing amounts so they have a representative share when gold becomes the basis for a new global monetary system.

Have global private gold savers/investors that comprise the great majority of its holders been buying in advance of a more formal currency reset (devaluation) of baseless paper against gold? Who are central banks buying their physical gold from currently? (Certainly they are not buying it from global commodities exchanges.) The only answer is that they must be buying all they can from the 80% to 90% of private gold holders in the world. And we should ask ourselves this: who has been buying gold consistently since 2000, when it traded around $250 an ounce, 11 years before central banks became net buyers? Could the buyers have been private holders around the world that understand wealth doesn’t begin and end with leveraged Western financial assets and baseless fiat currencies? This would make sense.

Still, the volume of physical gold traded relative to its stock remains tiny, implying that relatively few physical holders are willing to part with most of their gold. If central banks want to stock their shelves prior to devaluation then they would have to employ a bit of finesse. If we were a sovereign in search of gold we would short gold futures and take physical bullion off the market at synthetically low prices (the same way other sovereigns might manipulate, say, interest rates).

And finally, who are the private bullion-owning wealth holders that are leaking gold out to hungry governments and central banks? By definition they are collectively The Powers That Be. Whether they are disaggregated or conspiratorially linked, private gold holders are the true unencumbered savers among us. They are the ones that have a chunk of their wealth in a money form that stores purchasing power no matter what. And unlike fiduciaries overseeing the encumbered wealth of financial asset investors, there is no one and no system between them and their purchasing power.

We suspect most of these quiet savers are quite sophisticated, know exactly what they are doing, and view the preponderance of levered financial assets with suspicion regardless of whatever value they may have relative to one another. (Would it be that much of a stretch to believe these individuals holding trillions in inert rocks might also have great influence over global resources, monetary systems, banking systems and governments?)

Sophisticated Sophism

While Mr. Munger’s comments represent those of a power structure nominally larger and far more organized than private gold holders, it is a power structure that is unsustainable. Financial assets denominated in baseless paper currencies are marked-to-market many times higher than gold presently; however this pricing is only supported by the full faith and credit of a temporary authority, not by sustainable power. Functionally insolvent banking systems are supporting rotating politicians and policy makers, who, in turn, are furiously trying to reverse declining real output stemming from organic pressures for systemic de-leveraging. (During the leveraging process productive capital was greatly misallocated. During the de-leveraging process, it is logical that real productivity is declining.)

It would seem sustainable power no longer resides with the fellows, the institutions or the policies that promote a system in which higher numbers equal the false perception of sustainable wealth. It must reside in the commercial marketplace and among capital holders (those who own sustainable resources or sustainable savings that can buy resources no matter what the inflation-adjusted price is).The list of well-known baseless money promoters is long. We can start with virtually all central bankers, current, retired or passed-on, throw in virtually all economic and political leaders of the modern era, add icons like Messrs. Munger and Buffett sitting atop a pile of numbers, and, for good measure, leaven the whole meringue with journalists calling upon financiers posing as capitalists for instruction and guidance. It is obvious that the preponderance of people that have ascended to positions of authority has directly benefitted from the financial system and has no incentive to question its merits today.

Is it any wonder Bob Rubin, who gamed the capital markets so well at Goldman Sachs and the FX markets so well at Treasury, chose the academic Larry Summers to follow in his footsteps? Summers, the child of two highly regarded Keynesian economists and the nephew of Paul Samuelson, (the man who literally wrote the book for all budding economists on how to manage economies), leant an air of intellectual rigor to Rubin’s market manipulations. True to form Summers recoiled and shrieked “gold is the creationism of economics!” this past winter in response to a question of whether he thought a gold standard might provide more discipline to runaway fiscal spending. The particular economic canon he and the vast majority of contemporary economists worship is a theory called “political economics“, which assumes sustainable and growing economies are best ensured by actively synthesizing constant demand growth through fiscal, monetary and trade policies, not by overseeing human commercial incentives and the private marketplace. We ask you: which requires more faith?

Nor should we be surprised that Paul O’Neill and John Snow, actual businessmen, were run out of Washington after a couple of years and replaced by a money man, Hank Paulson. The Republican Paulson and the Democrat, New York Fed President, Tim Geithner, (who would replace Paulson after the peaceful transition of power in 2008), bought “illiquid” (i.e. mismarked) bank assets with newly created base money. Demand was temporarily synthesized by bringing future purchasing power forward and effectively transferring it from taxpayers to commercial banks. Though the pain would have been felt only in the financial sector had nothing been done, “independent” policy makers were able to avoid a counter-factual called “deep depression”, and both parties were able to take credit. While politics may stop at the water’s edge, it clearly begins on the corner of Wall and Broad.

Calvin Coolidge said in January 1925 that “the chief business of the American people is business”. He did not say (although 85 years later he certainly might have); “the business of America is having banks create unreserved credit so that the broader economy would then have to focus on repaying its debts to banks.” The difference between the two principles is that the former suggests human industry sorts resources best while the latter institutionalizes producers and consumers into an encumbered mass to be managed by a few. (Again, please forget politics here. We are not advocating how much to tax, who to tax or what to spend it on, only pointing out a corrupt and failing monetary system.)

Whether they know it or not, our authority figures today are working on behalf of banking systems. Banks borrow capital from the factors of production and create bookkeeping assets many multiples of that capital for themselves in the form of unreserved credit. Meanwhile, the credit they extend becomes debt for their borrowers, fully-collateralized for banks by the borrowers’ assets and future labor. Fractionally reserved banking systems effectively permit banks to conjure future claims on currency where no currency exists today; creating “when-issued money” from thin air that must eventually be settled by their central banks. This ensures inflation.

Political economics not only accommodates fractional reserve lending -- it relies on it. Its aim is to perpetuate nominal demand growth at all times to achieve full employment. This is a noble goal but it has a dark side too. Consistent demand growth requires consistent credit growth, which requires consistent debt growth and, in turn, public servitude to bank lenders. Policy makers ultimately find that inflation becomes an economic imperative in their effort to ease the nominal burden of repaying debts. (The business of America, the next President might say, is finance. This would seem entirely reasonable given that the next president will either be a proven budget buster or a professional leverager – a dismal tie in economic terms, a win in gold terms.)

Piffle & Baffle

Against this backdrop, Munger, Buffett, Bernanke, Geithner, Draghi, Lagarde, Rumpuy, Obama, Romney, McConnell, Boehner, Reid, Pelosi, Kudlow, Krugman, Roubini, Wolf, Hilsenrath, Kernen, etc. etc., seek to instill confidence among the factors of production and investors they influence. They are good and kind, highly intelligent and well-intentioned. But so what? Collectively they are wrong-headed. The fractional reserve banking system and debt money system they help sustain is directly responsible for the wealth and income inequality currently being experienced. (When they yell at the mention of this assertion ask them to disprove it.)

Promoting finance for the sake of financial return when it no longer produces capital cannot work. Arguing about taxes or austerity or budgets or infrastructure spending or political platforms is simply noise as more debt accrues and employment participation rates decline. What exactly is there to be confident about?

And why should perpetuating confidence be the foundation for all centrist economic policies? People at all income levels and of all political persuasions can no longer save their wages in the same currency it is paid. Are we to be confident that the real economy can expand when real wealth declines? Or that investing our excess baseless currency back into shares of productive businesses (denominated in the very same wasting currency) will provide investors with lasting purchasing power? Are we to be confident investing in a system where government, mortgage, corporate and municipal debts are priced at negative real rates because central banks, who will always have more money at their disposal than all bonds outstanding, threaten to continue buying them if need be?

We have met such authority figures and yes, they are usually charming, smart and dynamic. But almost without exception it seems they confuse their theories, (rationalized with econometric models filled with unrepeatable observations), for physical science.

Confidence in productive assets may be more warranted than confidence in bonds and baseless cash, but this does not mean one should have confidence about future real production, wealth creation, economic growth or the post-Bretton Woods monetary system. When the global monetary regime reduces to the solvency of one global banking system with interconnected, uncollateralized receivables, as it does today, then its sustainability relies on: a) the ability and/or willingness of depositors to keep savings in the banking system, (love those debit cards!), and, b) the willingness of the factors of production to continue accepting unreserved currency as compensation and the willingness of capital holders to save and invest in it. As workers, savers, investors, consumers, taxpayers, policy makers and politicians, why should we count on such unwarranted confidence to continue?

It is within this context that Mr. Munger and others urge those curious about gold to start walking upright, to stop dragging their knuckles on the pavement. They counsel civilized people to reinvest their baseless wages into baseless shares of productive businesses selling goods and services in return for baseless revenues and earnings. Do not save in a relatively scarce form of money, they say or imply, (because saving starves creditors and leads to nominal output contraction)! Again, it’s not about nominal anything; it’s about the purchasing power of wages, savings and investment.

Finance may be doomed but commerce is not. Total global bank assets are about $95 trillion and total bank reserves are not quite $10 trillion. This fractionally-reserved global banking system does not necessarily imply immediate economic contraction because there is no obvious catalyst that would force the leverage gap to suddenly close (though the JPM news just hit…). However, substantial bank leverage in combination with already highly-leveraged depositors, capital holders and consumers, are significantly retarding demand and real economic activity. There simply is no natural incentive for lenders or borrowers to leverage their balance sheets further, which in turn means that output growth and asset prices must continue to decline in real terms.

And so we think it would be fair to caution against heeding the advice of a self-interested financial establishment trying to fit a flawed, unsustainable and quickly deteriorating set of theories into what they would like us to believe is a noble and patriotic goal. The common good is not necessarily expressed accurately by past financial asset winners and the ambitious policy makers they support. Their barking is becoming more frequent -- a clear sign that their baseless protestations and accusations are failing to turn the tide (not against squeaky pipsqueaks like us, but against fundamental logic, human incentives and the mathematical power of compounding nominal debts).

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

There is no reason to expect the demise of Western hegemony and no need to promote gold. Gold will be priced significantly higher in fiat terms over time, (or next week, who knows), either by the markets or by an administered fiat devaluation. There can be no fiscal solution over any amount of time; growth, austerity or some optimal combination of the two can no longer work. The only way out is massive currency dilution and we expect leaders across the political spectrum in all debtor nations to ensure this occurs.

We have no doubt the same misguided establishment will reverse course to save the day. They will ultimately choose to destroy the burden of repaying domestic debt through monetary inflation, a process that would reward the great majority of voters. They will choose this route because the alternative will be to keep exporting Western capital to developing economies and continued domestic unemployment. (Krugman wins.) By doing so, the West will have successfully shorted its currencies to export economies and will have received cheap imported goods and resources in exchange.

The developed economies of the West will become more vibrant afterwards because the prices of goods, services, labor, assets and liabilities will again reflect market clearing real (de-levered) values. Nominal prices may be unrecognizable but affordability across all income levels will improve. Debtor nations will wipe the slate clean and their factors of production will again be globally competitive.

The key to a successful transition is a credible monetary reset. Gold is the default collateral for money because it has a long and established precedent in this role. All that would be needed would be a fairly equitable distribution of gold among global monetary authorities (taking place now?), and an agreed-upon exchange rate vis-à-vis baseless paper. It would have to be an exchange rate at which central banks could successfully monetize assets by tendering for physical gold with newly manufactured paper money, an exchange rate high enough to attract enough gold to cover unreserved credit held in the banking system. It’s a high figure. The relative cost of holding physical gold today is minimal, (above-ground bullion or in-ground bullion through mining shares), against the negative real returns offered by the preponderance of financial assets in float.

We suggest one keep identities straight; invest with central banks, not against them; and consider the hollow rhetoric of the establishment that may temporarily suppress its paper price “a gift”. They are working for physical gold holders, not against them.

"...however, it would be illogical to think that the aggregate value of the money bucket should not equal the aggregate value of the all-things-not-money bucket at all times."

No, what would be illogical would be to believe that this is true. First off, try to approach it from the positive, and find a factual methodology that could make this true. You can't do it. There is simply no reason to believe that the supply of money EVER equals the supply of wealth. Anyone who does so is merely making it all fit via flexible prices, assuming that all parts fit into the whole. Problem is, these two buckets are not the same thing.

It's no different than mutiplying the current gold price by all of the gold in the world to come up with a market size. It is a fiction. There's no way you can buy (or value) all supplied items at current market price.

Long story short, the authors are seemingly unfamiliar with Menger's Marginal Revolution and the Water/Diamond Paradox.

No doubt China is buying the hell out of this dip. They don't give a flying you-know-what about the criminal central bankers, they know that sooner or later most printed paper will be backed by the metals.

How does my buying gold take capital (Fiat) away from productive businesses? Whoever takes my check for some gold doesn't bury it in the ground, it goes to a bank, that may lend a fraction of that out again. Money is not destroyed when a private citizen buys gold.

Not only that, my gold will retain it's buying power. Houses and cars depreciate and suck capital into the black hole of insurance, utilities, and energy usage.

I agree that, while interesting, this article has flaws. It makes no sense to assume that the value of outstanding monies should balance the value of all other economic goods. This appears to be a confusion of stocks and flows, similar to the fallacy being pushed by some critics of the banking system that there "is not enough money to pay back all principal and interest."

The (alleged) job of a central bank is to maintain the value of that derivative.

But there's no factual way to determine the value of a derivative. Like MBS for example. There's no factual way to determine the value of mortgages behind that MBS. Same with a federal reserve note (US dollar). There's no factual way to determine what a FRN is worth.

So the value of a derivative is subjective, whatever someone believes it's worth. The value of a FRN is what someone believes it's worth, just like the value of a MBS is what someone believes it's worth.

This subjective nature of the value is why derivatives are so vulnerable to fraud. For example MBS were riding high in 2007. By the end of 2008 they were nearly worthless. Why? Because the fraud behind their alledged value was discovered (no-doc loans, liar loans, welfare moms buying $500,000 homes, MERS, and all that).

The value of a FRN is just as vulnerable to fraud. The biggest fraud is Fed printing more of them, diluting their value, without telling the public. TARP was the first big example. The public was told it was a $700 billion loan from the government. They weren't told the $700 billion would have to be borrowed from the Fed, meaning it had to be printed (or digitally created), expanding the money supply, diluting the value of every FRN out there.

Since then trillions more dollars have been printed (or digitally created) for QE1, QE2, and all manner of behind-the-scenes bank bailouts. Somebody said it was up to $27 trillion, and that was over a year ago. It's probably over $30 trillion easily by now when you add in euro currency swaps, IMF contributions, etc.

Keep in mind the money supply was around $2 trillion before TARP. So $30 trillion created since then is a 15 x increase in the money supply.

But the Fed says it's really not part of the money supply, most of it is in reserve accounts at the Fed, not circulating.

Nonetheless they still acknowledge the money supply being about $10 trillion now.

From $2 trillion to $10 trillion in 3 years. Sounds like hyperinflation to me. Maybe that's why the dollar has lost 50% of it's value in that same 3 year period.

Count your blessings, it should have lost 80% of its value. But the general public doesn't know the money supply has expanded from $2 trillion to $10 trillion ($32 trillion actually), and nobody's gonna tell 'em either (they wouldn't understand anyway, probably not even care).

No, currency isn't credit. Currency is a derivative.

But a special kind of derivative. A derivative with absolutely nothing behind it.

The wise gold bug doesn't engage in taxable events on already taxed earnings, a trader does. To me "gold bugs" by their nature are savers...the base.

Perhaps he was talking about Jessie or whoever...who uses paper to gain advantage in the object...but that's a full time job in itself. For myself (working and accepting a depreciating fiat for my labor) I keep stacking after tax...no commissions, fees, records, forms, filings, software, questions or hassles required after exchange.

If they can manage to liquidate the credit compounded on it further (called fiat) in order to dilute the dollar/euro...lol...drachma..."price" of it, I'm a happy man and remain eternally grateful for their folly ;-)

Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them.
David Ricardo

Gold doesn't have any intrinsic value. It may be relatively scarce but you can't eat it and if you were dying of hunger you'd trade all your gold for some food. It's only worth something if someone else wants it. I'd rather have a storage shed full of imperishable food items than gold.

Or, better to store your treasure in heaven where thieves won't break in to steal, etc.

Dude you just refuted your point. Gold like paper dollars would be happily exchanged enmasse if you were starving. Supply vs demand. I'd expect though that the food seller would more readiily take all of your gold though, knowing there is always a ready buyer of it.

In 1864, if you were selling food to a starving confederate soldier, would you take his Confederate notes or gold, or Iraqi Dinars in 2008 from an Arab.

Your argument is so vacous it is tedious to constantly have to refute it.

Paper dollars don't have any intrinsic value. It may be relatively scarce but you can't eat it and if you were dying of hunger you'd trade all your dollars for some food. It's only worth something if someone else wants it. I'd rather have a storage shed full of imperishable food items than dollars.

Stocks don't have any intrinsic value. It may be relatively scarce but you can't eat it and if you were dying of hunger you'd trade all your stocks for some food. It's only worth something if someone else wants it. I'd rather have a storage shed full of imperishable food items than stocks.

Bonds don't have any intrinsic value. It may be relatively scarce but you can't eat it and if you were dying of hunger you'd trade all your bonds for some food. It's only worth something if someone else wants it. I'd rather have a storage shed full of imperishable food items than bonds.

While I won't comment on what "you" would rather do. you sir are an ignoramous. Where shall I "stash" $5.5 million worth of rice, beans and toilet paper. This article was not written for your financial demographic.

I prefer the taste of gold over imperishable food items. Whatever, the peace we all will achieve after all the lies and fraud is exposed and withers in the sunlight will be worth a ton of gold by itself. Let it end soon.

Ricardo is wrong. There is no value apart from a valuer. Nothing is intrinsically valuable without someone to place value upon it.

The converse is also false, contra the Austrians: there is no purely subjective value either. Value that exists ONLY in the mind of a valuer--that is, apart from an object to be valued--is a contradiction in terms.

Value arises at the intersection of a consciousness (valuer) focused on an object as a means of satisfying some aspect of the valuer's existence. Both subject and object are required; neither independently imparts value. Menger understood this; his students, not so much.

EDIT: The above is not to suggest that gold is not a valuable tool, only that it does not have intrinsic value. Indeed, it has value precisely because (some) people see it as one way to protect themselves from arbitrary wealth confiscation. And it is for precisely this reason that gold has been valued by our forebears and has served as money, with the only exceptions being the last 40 to 80 years (a mere temporal blip in human history).

Interesting argument. I don't agree with it...but it's interesting. Subjective is not only defined as something solely within someone's mind, but it means "personally", too. Prices are set at the margin by marginal buyers and sellers depending upon their "personal" needs and wants. They trade something that is subjectively less valuable for something personally more valuable. The terms are interchangeable.

Withdrawn Consent is correct. As Ayn Rand would say, "the concept of 'value' begs the question, "of value to whom and for what purpose?" ".

ALL value is subjective, even life. Some things may be valued by some persons even more than their own life, or even the lives of their loved ones.

All value is RELATIVE as well, as can be judged by arguments of "if someone put a gun to your head"...my answer to that is the same...some men will judge life more valuable than "X", and some won't. It depends on the man and what "X" is.

Nothing has intrinsic value. All things depend on the value placed by people. That is what creates Demand. And at That point is where the supply matters. The scarce supply of things may exist, but if that is unrecognized the value that is placed on them remains low. It is only when Demand ramps up that 'value' -meaning in this case 'worth' compared to other stores of value- begins to rise. IF demand is strong enough it may even be blind to tremendous supply (beanie-babies, post 1980 baseball cards,dot-com tech stocks etc). So neither is the value of PMs intrinsic.

Ricardo wasted his economic mind searching for the "invariable measure of value". Value is subjective...intrinsic value is an illusion. Ricardo was debunked by the Marginalist Revolution, but not before Marx and Mill proved just how dangerous his labor theory of value really was.

I'm not picking, but it can be financially ruinous to think of commodities as having intrinsic value. At the end of Ricardo's life, even he couldn't figure out why some wine appreciated in value without additional labor or capital invested in it. ;)

Disclaimer: I invest in PM's because I think they will have a high subjective value in the future.

I agree completely except for one thing. I am going to want some bankers' heads rolling in the street. We need to take it to them big time. Anyone who thinks the current system, and that means you Krugman, is the way to go, that it is okay to put people into slave labor and continue to devalue their income and property so that bankers can get richer and more and more of the world's assets, needs to meet a samurai sword. These bastards are pure evil and need to be purged from society the way we would gas cockroaches. I am not talking about your local banker who is providing a service and just doing a job, but the greedy sob like Jamie Dimon and the sorry bastards that facilitate their thievery like Hank Paulson.

I don't think the implication was that this would be an orderly and cooperative venture, just a natural outcome of the fact that, as you point out, POLITICIANS are involved. They will ensure the outcome, simply by pushing all pain into the future at all possible moments, as they've been doing for many years.

As a buyer of Precious Metals, you know the importance of secure storage for your highly valuable holdings. On your next purchase from APMEX, consider free delivery to a high-security private storage facility through Citadel Global Depository Services, Inc., a trusted Precious Metals depository services company and wholly owned subsidiary of APMEX. With Citadel, you always own the physical metal but a global leader in security safeguards your assets for you in a private, high-security vault.

There is nothing "civilized" about pre-emptive war, officially sanctioned torture, random roadside checkpoints, intrusive and outrageous police-state shakedowns at airports and train stations, automatic government surveillance and recording of ALL electronic communications, capricious official thievery (a.k.a. "asset forfeiture"), nor the draconian crackdown on, suppression of, and authoritarian hostility toward formerly tolerated (if not applauded) peaceful public protests, or just about ANY form of public political dissent nowadays.

"Civilization" is already, and has been for many decades, on a downward spiral. Downward, and accelerating.

Welcome to the Police State, proles. Now shut up and work (if you can find any).

With all due respect aerojet, "they" will be unable to do anything of the sort ... at least not for long. The short reason is that any attempt to tax, confiscate, or otherwise "make holders of gold suffer" will make gold less valuable in that economic system and it will flow to where it has the most purchasing power which will be where is is traded most freely. In fact, official devaluation isn't really possible anymore either since it would require an official gold price fixing which wouldn't survive the first day against the free physical gold market. As soon as the implicit gold window was reopened, the world would begin to drain that treasury of its physical gold.

This author simply repeats all that we know about gold, and, unfortunately, dilutes his long rant with "gold is money". Fortunately, it is not money: it is an extremely valuable asset with much more upside potential than "money".

It would be a shame for us goldbugs if gold becomes "money", and gets an established price from the central bankers, as it did for the first part of the last century.

Gold is (or at least is used as) money and has been since the dawn of civilization. That governments have attempted to hijack its highest monetary function, the efficient transmission of wealth through time and space, doesn't make it any less money. A government-fixed-price gold standard will not (cannot) return. The paper wealth of the world, currently fleeing into USD, will soon see the true worth of those paper promises as well and will not trust any further fiat valuations. There is only one vehicle left that will stand the coming inflation inferno. People ultimately decide what is money, not governments and they have always come back to gold to protect their wealth; this time won't be any different. What will be different this time is that the whole world is going to come to the same conclusion at about the same time.

I wonder how many shallow and specious anti-gold trolls will descend on this thread?

One has to question the furious and desperate lengths to which certain posters will repeatedly go in the attempt to sway others from making a "worthless" investment/purchase which affects those posters not at all.

I DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THIS BUT I WROTE THE FOLLOWING WHILE IN SELF-IMPOSED EXILE FROM THIS SITE----maybe the anti-gold trolls will have fun with it, and, akak, thanks for your consciousness om

re:Gold

According to a recent article, there are 6 billion ounces(all that has ever been found) of gold in negotiable form on the planet. This seemed to me to be an amazing coincidence because, according to my count, this is also about how many humans ther are. I won't argue the precise number of the human population here; no one knows the true number, anyway, because all the numbers are 'estimated according to-----' and in today's world 'ten per cent plus or minus' is quite acceptable.

Six billion ounces of gold for six billion persons is obviously one ounce per person; quite simple and basic math. This makes economics, also, quite simple and basic; if we accept the premise that gold is the true money and that one per cent hold 90% of the human 'wealth'. We can figure out exactly who the one per cent are and how much gold, on average, each holds and understand what this means.

The math is too simple to do; one percent of six billion is 60 million people. Likewise, the math is simple for how much each of the one per cent holds: six billion divide by 60 million is 100 ounces times 90 per cent comes out to 90 ounces of gold for each member of the '1 per centers'. So, there it is-----a one per center holds 90 ounces of gold where gold is the only true measure of wealth and one per cent of the human population holds 90% of all wealth.

This is not so much gold since had one bought 90 ounces at $300 per ounce---for a $27,000 purchase price, that person would now be one of the 60 million people who hold nearly all of the wealth of human society. A lot to think about, is it not?

How many of us in the US took this easy way to fortune? Ten, one hundred, a thousand, ten thousand----I don't know but I would guess less than a thousand people and, perhaps, no more than one hundred did this in a single purchase while the opportunity was so easily within the reach of the rest of us. And how many of us now, hold 90 ounces of the physical? Or how many, after reading this, and while physical is still to be picked up at the pittance of less than $1700 per ounce, are doing so rather than writing mindless trash on this wonderful blog?

But, maybe, the premises are wrong. Maybe, gold is not the only true money and, perhaps, the one per cent is no more than a figment of the imagination-----who can say? But, lest anyone think that the opportunity above is 'going to get away', try this experiment:

Go tell a thousand persons the tale above, explain the mechanics, and prevail upon them to act-------I think each of us will learn a lot about our fellow humans. I'm also quite certain that not one person with whom you speak will step up to the plate and buy 90 ounces of the physical even if you give them the cash. To those among us who might say, “I'll take that offer---the others are too stupid”, I say,

“Great!! You pretend that I have given the money and you have it in hand, and I'll pretend that you are smarter than the rest; but in real time, I have to ask if you are so smart---why don't you have the 90 ounces of gold?”

Me too---I'm so so stupid that I only realized these premises three days ago----and I had the fucking $27,000 in cash at the time!!!!

BTW, 90 ounces at $1700 as I write is still only $153,000 and I'll bet not one person who reads this will buy the 90 ounces even though it is within reach. If I am wrong about you, I lose the bet, but I want you to send me three ounces of gold as my loss; it is the least you can do for an oldman who put you among the 1 %ers.

Curious fact: to be a millionaire in gold requires 589 ounces at $1700 per ounce."

What if there was on Earth, enough Black Gold to back the Fiat 100X over? The classic 2-sets of books that is the norm. What if we were taught to believe we live on a planet of great scarcity of wealth and that we must all grovel for the crumbs and fight each other for a share (except the Prison Masters, of course), even though their plenty for all After all, that is what capitalism is all about, creating the illusion of scarcity and getting the Wage Slaves to exchange their labor for System Tokens to get what is needed to sustain life. What if there existed technologies that are decades, even centuries ahead of what has been released into the 'public domain", aka the Slave World. What if energy was free to every individual and unlimited, for example. If you had unlimited electricity available anywhere you were in the world, which country would you live in? What would you "trade" for work? What if those techologies had been paid for by the labor of billions of people only to be syphoned off and hidden away by a small group of humans with sociopathic Satanistic worship? How would you react to knowing this was true?

There is no fix for the system. It is outside the box. Outside the prison cell, known as your belief system.

There is no greater evil and suffering than being a slave, and not even knowing it.

"It is within this context that Mr. Munger and others urge those curious about gold to start walking upright, to stop dragging their knuckles on the pavement. They counsel civilized people to reinvest their baseless wages into baseless shares of productive businesses selling goods and services in return for baseless revenues and earnings."

Do not save in a relatively scarce form of money, they say or imply, (because saving starves creditors and leads to nominal output contraction)! Again, it’s not about nominal anything; it’s about the purchasing power of wages, savings and investment.

Charlie Munger also said that he didn't like HFT and algorithmic trading and that he would do away with them. I don't think that Mr. Munger elaborated enough about his strong sentiment against Gold. He didn't bad mouth Silver or Platinum. Foreign interests are buying the world's Gold reserves. I say let them have it. Let the foreignors have the dead weight. Buy white metal.

He is exactly correct. Commerce will not stop. We will find a way to trade / barter / deal to obtain the materials necessary to continue production, and to sell to our customers. The nominal measurement of an oz of gold / silver in terms of any paper currency will have to go high enough to price out all of the inflated currences. As the governments / central banks inflate more, the number keeps moving higher. The cost of storing PM's today is insignificant when compared to present negative interest rates, and the future savings upon the death of the paper system.

The Eastern governments see it clearly, and are converting paper assets to hard assets. The unconscionable efforts of Buffett and Munger, et al, in their campaign for the starvation of the working, uninformed people will be recorded by history. Remember their names.

The problem with people like this is that just because they're MUCH smarter than the bastards they're lashing out at they think that they ARE smart.

Yes, things WILL reset.

No, not only will the prices of things be unrecognizable, but THINGS themselves won't be recognizable. You see, this isn't some sort of economic cycle-reset. This is a CIVILIZATION reset. In the BIG TRANSITION people will revert to using a more accountable substance such as gold, but in the long-run, when things have moderated and people are a bit more even wealth-wise, it'll be of less importance (not to say it won't have importance, just not as much [which, if you really think about it, that 2/3 of the world's population, which lives on $3/day or less, gets by without any exposure to it at all]).

Those in power will eventually reclaim their positions, either through violence or connivance. It's their nature. That will be the case up until we recognize that THEY cannot provide anything to anyone, and that their illusions are just that, illusions meant to deceive.

Oh, one correction for the authors: Gold did have some industrial exposure during the earlier electronics era (there still is some in use, though not like before).

The game is unwinding perfectly, as indeed it was encoded to do. Watch the public PRICE of PAPER gold continue to burn as this is the very mechanism by which PHYSICAL Gold's true VALUE is revealed to all (BIS,of course, already knows).

Had a dream that the US, the ECB and the BOJ got together and decided that since their fiat currencies are failing, the solution was to create a "super fiat" common currency between them under the guise of bringing "stability" to the market(s), but really to bail out all their sorry asses before the jig was up and continue their hold onto "power".

The spanner in the works came when China and Russia said fuck off, we are creating our own common currency and we are basing it on gold.

Sweet! I imagine the new currency artwork looks like American in a white wig blowing a british banker dressed in red, with a Japanese plane crashing into a pyamid in the background. And that's just on the front of the 100 Banzai note.

its all a complete failure......only fix is to have complete breakdown and build new. from scratch......bunch of idiots with gadgets in their hands talking about a facebook ipo and ipads. technology=disease

its all a complete failure......only fix is to have complete breakdown and build new. from scratch......bunch of idiots with gadgets in their hands talking about a facebook ipo and ipads. technology=disease

Gold has always been money, as are dollars, euros and yen. It is not a currency or media of exchange presently because no one directly exchanges it for goods, services or assets and it has not formally collateralized other currencies since 1971.

***********

Gold is not a medium of exchange but it most definitly is a currency-

It competes with currencies-central banks hold it and are buyers of gold and when they wanted their currencies to be weak-they at one time sold gold to weaken their paper currencies-

They still want weak currencies-but the trust in all of them is slipping-

This is something that all governments are working towards. Imagine if that existed today, zero black market in Greece... and omnipotent control over all citizenry. The government could in effect tract every transaction.

The thing I like best about gold, is not the tarnish proof reflection or malleability, or the value it has held over centuries but rather how these properties of a metal are used to challenge and shape our belief systems. Therein lays its true power.

...lets see, umm, ''they'' already told you ''their'' goal is ''their'' New World Order. So, it just so happens to match prophecy. ''They'' are evil and have been given the prophetic strong delusion because they are lying bastard antichrist freaks and ''they'' have established the power to overcome the people, that reject ''their'' false claim, by ways and means of (general) public deception. So, if you want the new image of the proverbial beast to assume the market, and the human hosts among all the nations, to hurry up and happen already, well, that desire defines the fact that ''you'' have willfully rejected mercy and ''you'' accept ''their'' offer, and, ''you'' are one of ''them'' now, lol, marked and sealed by your own judgment, defined by ''their'' black hole. Those piles of the Golden Calf are in contempt of mercy, and are the image of the prophetic beast, which is borderless, as borderless as the plague of death in Egypt, save the mark of mercy upon the door. That Golden Calf image requires human slaughter and the binding of the nations, that is the image of the Suicide Vampire Squid of the Great Wal Mart of China. So drink up, little Miss Rambo. ride the black hole beast straight to zero, the beginning and end without cause, darkness. Such prophetic desire, for the great and terrible day, shall quicken The Light of that day, The Light, coming, upon the last and the first, the revelation of The One, the risen and sustaining image of love and mercy, The Glory of our Father in Christ.

Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army Ret.), President of the Natural Solutions Foundation, an international NGO (non-governmental organization), released a 27 minute public service Estimate of Situation about Fukushima, Japan focusing on the immediate threat to the Northern Hemisphere emanating from the highly radioactive ruins of the 5 Fukushima nuclear reactors. The video is available without charge at http://www.GeneralBert.com.

Gen. Stubblebine’s prognosis is dire: “When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.”

General Stubblebine details in his riveting video the amounts of radioactive materials that will be propelled across the Pacific and across the United States if the Fukushima reactor structures (especially Spent Fuel Pool Number 4) collapse. With over 15,000 ‘spent fuel rods’ on the site, the Fukushima reactors have accumulated one of the largest stockpiles of these dangerous, intensely radioactive materials on the planet. No remediation work is being done at the site; there is no official remedial planning or disaster preparation. No private remediation, or public discussion of the need for it, is permitted by the Government of Japan under its new suppression of nuclear discussion laws.

The Natural Solutions Foundation joins seventy Japanese NGOs(1) in calling upon the Secretary General of the United Nations and Prime Minister of Japan last month to coordinate emergency action to shore-up critical structures now at imminent risk of collapse. It has been variously estimated(2), that a relatively mild earthquake (i.e., 5.0 or greater on the Richter Scale) will collapse the previously damaged Spent Fuel Rod holding tank of Unit No. 4, containing 85 times the amount of radioactive Cesium137 contained in Chernobyl's now-entombed reactor. An estimated 1Million Europeans are believed to have died as a direct result of that radiation emission following the nuclear explosion of Chernobyl.

The US Government's statistics document an excess death rate of 20,000 US residents, mostly healthy infants, in the first 9 months following the multiple nuclear events at Fukushima. .

As a humanitarian, strategist, intelligence analyst, father and grandfather, General Bert understands that doing nothing is, quite simply, not an option.

Following his incisive Estimate of Situation, General Bert’s free public service video outlines four simple steps you can take to protect yourself and your family.

Please visit http://www.GeneralBert.com to access this urgent warning and subsequent updates without cost. And please share this link with all your circles of influence.

The Trustees of the Natural Solutions Foundation, the largest health freedom organization in the world, urge your participation in disseminating this message since the mainstream media has remained curiously silent in the United States on this massive increase in radiation. The lack of information is, however, a matter of State policy in Japan where it is now a felony offense to discuss negative aspects of either nuclear power or the Fukushima situation in particular.

I don't see how Fukushima is a threat in and of itself in any significant way to threaten a significant portion of the population.

Not to say that it won't have generations of more slight damaging effect. Chernobyl has a Graphite-moderated boiling water reactor. The graphite made it highly combustible. The reactor also had no containment structure and nothing stopped the trajectory of radioactive materials into the air-- Fukushima was more well built/ more modern.

Radiation released was 370,000 terabecquerels* (as of 12 April) got Fukushima and 5.2 million terabecquerels* for Chernobyl.

Fukushima is being brought down t0 a "cold shutdown condition", a key milestone in bringing it under control. It will take decades to dismantle it completely however. Chernobyl is encased in a concrete shell.

chain reaction. bitchez... I guess the threat still lingers... as what would stop a complete nuclear chain reaction from initiating; but the "rods" being exposed to air-- sounds sketchy; unless that somehow initiated a chain reaction...still don't see how would significantly effect on all of humanity/ world.

A typical 20-kiloton atomic bomb releases 4,000 curies of cesium-137; a thousand 20-kiloton bombs = or 20 megatons. The total output for all fission bombs and tests is about 217 megatons (or 34 million curies of cesium-137. Chernobyl emitted about 4 million curies of cesium-137 into the environment. And we are still alive and kicking, for the post part... I don't see how Fukushima would release more megatons of radiation then Chernobyl; even if Fukushima is not entirely contained.

Absolutely shameless fearmongering accompanied by Army uniforms, grandfather pleas, and marching music to hawk a newsletter. Not to say that Fukushima is not a problem. But that is beside the point. The delivery here should make clear that this guy has 99.999% his own financial interests in mind and perhaps 0.001% anyone elses, if that much. Free information is out there and, if you need more, there are far more honest newsletter writers.

Great catch Tapeworm, I was flimflammed by the context and did not pay attention to the details. (An easy mark) Either bullcrap or poor editing, perhaps the author meant OZ, anyway, per Wolfram Alpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/ search on the 5000 tonnes = 0Z is equal to .42 daily mass of trash produced by New York City per day or 1.6 mass of a Saturn rocket. Anyway you cut it that is a lot of crap flying around Russia if this is true.

"Who are central banks buying their physical gold from currently? (Certainly they are not buying it from global commodities exchanges.) The only answer is that they must be buying all they can from the 80% to 90% of private gold holders in the world."

What makes you think they aren't buying it directly from miners? China buys a lot of gold from Burma I'm sure.